Early education can lead to a larger cerebral cortex, as measured forty year later, study finds.
Stories transport us to another world.
Children did better at school if their parents spent more time with them.
Children did better at school if their parents spent more time with them.
Spending time with children is the key to making them smarter, new research concludes.
Children whose parents spend more quality time with them do better in school.
While genetics plays its part, being there for a child has a more powerful effect.
Being present for the child is even more important than economic status, the study also suggested.
Professor Bruce Weinberg, study co-author, said:
“In the ongoing debate over what helps children succeed academically, we show that genetics is not the only major factor.
It is also about the time that parents spend with their children.”
The conclusions come from research involving over almost a million children in Israel.
Over 22,000 had lost a parent before the age of 18 and the parents of 77,000 had divorced.
They compared this with how well the children had done on a college entry test.
The researchers wanted to see what effect losing a parent had on their test results.
The results showed that the educational level of a parent who died became less important for the child’s academic success.
In other words, having smart parents is not what matters most — it’s how they bring you up.
Also, children who lost their mothers tended to do worse academically.
Professor Weinberg explained:
“The loss of a mother — who tends to spend more time than the father with her children — had a bigger effect than loss of a father in our study.”
Professor Weinberg said:
“We found similar results in those children who experienced parental death and parental divorce.
That provides strong evidence that our results are more general than just for children who suffered a parental death.
Other studies show that highly educated parents tend to spend more time with their children.
Our results may suggest one reason why they do: It has a strong impact on academic success.”
The study is to be published in the Journal of Labor Economics (Gould et al., 2019).
How caffeine during pregnancy affects the child’s IQ, brain and behaviour.
Higher IQ from breastfeeding may be explained by nutrients in the milk, mother-child bonding and parenting behaviours.
The study included almost 100 babies who were tracked for two decades.
Around half of American parents report having spanked their children in the last year and one-third in the last week.
Unfortunately, this style is considered normal by parents around the world.
The right parenting style reduces the child’s risk of experiencing depression and anxiety.
Mental health problems can strike anyone.
Mental health problems can strike anyone.
A happy childhood does not guarantee against developing mental health problems later on, a study finds.
Even people who experience many positive early childhood experiences can go on to develop anxiety and depression or other mental health issues.
It shows how mental health problems can strike anyone.
The research also reaffirms the connection between negative childhood experiences and mental health problems, like depression and paranoia.
While childhood experiences can set the tone for our lives, they do not determine our destiny.
Rather our mental health depends on how we adapt to stressful circumstances in adulthood.
Those who fail to cope are those who are more likely to succumb.
The conclusions come a study that tracked over 300 children in Australia.
Ms Bianca Kahl, the study’s first author, said:
“This research shows that mental health conditions are not solely determined by early life events, and that a child who is raised in a happy home, could still grow up to have a mental health disorder.
There’s certainly some missing factors in understanding how our childhood environment and early life experiences might translate into mental health outcomes in adulthood.
We suspect that it’s our expectations about our environments and our ability to adapt to scenarios when our expectations are not being met, that may be influencing our experiences of distress.
If, as children, we learn how to adapt to change, and we learn how to cope when things do not go our way, we may be in a better position to respond to stress and other risk factors for poor mental health.
Testing this hypothesis is the focus of the next research study.”
The study was published in the journal Current Psychology (Kahl et al., 2020).
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